This review by Jeremy
Hooker appeared in PN Review 122
Volume 24 Number 6, July - August 1998

IN THE SPIRIT OF WILLIAM BLAKE ANDREW JORDAN, The Mute Bride (Stride) £7.95

'Buried, 'ancestral', 'decoded', 'invisible', 'mute': the
adjectives Andrew Jordan has used in the titles of his books of poems indicate
his persistent concern with the hidden, the repressed, that which lies under.
Jordan is a 'poet of place', but not in a conventional way. He writes from
passionate knowledge of southern England, and creates a palpable and luminous
sense of specific landscapes and places, such as Winchester and Southampton.
But Jordan is anti-picturesque; he does not depict appearances but the forces
that shape them, and the possibilities they contain. His subject is the human
mind, which constructs prisons for being, and has the capacity to destroy
them. He is as far from sentimental regionalism as are Roy Fisher or John
Riley or the Geoffrey Hill of Mercian Hymns. He has a political imagination,
a religious sensibility hostile to established religion, and, like the poets
named above, he has an idea of 'England' that subverts the stereotypes, and
writes of self and nation and society in the spirit of William Blake.

Unlike many English poets, Jordan risks taking on an intellectual
role, and articulates his ideas with lucidity and wit. He uses postmodernist
terms for his own purposes, rather than allowing himself to be used by them,
as may be seen in 'A Nonist Manifesto' (Angel Exhaust 15). There, he proposes
'That all myths of place must be exposed'. The project is libertarian, as
in Blake; and in the poems in The Mute Bride it takes the form of using myth
to deconstruct myth, in order to release energies - imaginative and communitarian
- imprisoned in constructions of self and society, energies with which human
beings can remake their lives together and in harmony with life on earth.

'A collective unconscious, a powerful underworld, shimmers
beneath the ground.' This is the force latent in Jordan's landscapes, giving
them a numinous quality. The otherworld that shines through his ancient places
is not a faery realm, but a source of renewal: human potential, 'enclosed'
by repression, the power of contained desire. A landscape that has been unmade,
literally, is at the centre of the book: Twyford Down, where Jordan participated
in resistance to the M3 road development. And, close to Twyford Down, St Catherine's
Hill, site of a medieval chapel dedicated to St Catherine. In the remarkable
sequence in 19 parts, 'Larksong Over Twyford Down', which concludes the book,
'archetypal St Catherine' with her 'flaming wheel' is described, as 'representing:
/ besieged nature, a goddess of hilltops; / an older solar deity - resistance'.

One might expect the poet to despair at the unsuccessful
outcome of resistance on Twyford Down. The opposite is rather the case. Evidently
the experience of resistance reinforced Jordan's belief in the spirit of community.
I would also surmise on the basis of internal evidence that witnessing the
massive effort of unmaking strengthened his awareness of the constructed landscape
and of the human power to imagine and to build differently, so that the failure
of resistance was not only an end, but also a beginning. Moreover, Jordan
has, in more than one sense, a saving sense of humour. Indeed, his hope is
founded on a sense of the absurd, embodied in 'Green Men' who 'Laugh at how
our symbols of hope, / nature, divine power, are always made / alive for us
by suffering again'. Such laughter is not the mockery of despair, but a fertilising
energy.

'St Catherine spins her wheel of desire / over Winchester,
a decayed Jerusalem.' The Blakean spirit informing The Mute Bride does not
depend upon such references, but is present in the desire itself. Jordan's
'places' are where imaginative vision is opposed to mere seeing, archetypal
creativity to history:

Impossible to imagine such desire cooling,
like a sun becoming old and massive,
a red giant in the sky above St Catherine's Hill.
Then, all that we can hold will be history —
a broken goddess on a stilled wheel;
a landscape finally, utterly, destroyed;
no forest anywhere, no orchids, no huge
insects hanging in their webs, no bright birds,
no cross of hope with anyone's plan
nailed onto it, no sovereignty, despair —
just angels wiping their faces away,
with no more need to see forwards,
blinded by the lack of any future.

I have emphasised the English tradition to which I believe
Jordan's subversive use of myth belongs. Another influence at work in The
Mute Bride is that of Rilke. Blake and Rilke are potent influences, of course.
They have in common a spirit of independence, with which they remake tradition,
and a consequent sense of possibility, of the human capacity to create anew.
That Jordan can come under their influence without resorting to pastiche is
a tribute to his own independence of mind. A necessary independence, born
in a poet who is passionately involved with the area he knows, and who is
acutely aware of the dangers of neo-Georgianism, and of sentimental and picturesque
treatments of ancient landscapes, which, unlike Roy Fisher's city, have been
seen and seen again.

The Mute Bride takes risks, and is an ambitious book with
little interest in small perfections. It combines personal and political materials,
and is craftily organized. It begins with 'deep stirrings' in the poet's early
life, which are treated indirectly, showing that sexual desire is a force
that pervades human life and nature. Andrew Jordan's muse is St Catherine
with the flaming wheel, and his concern is with liberating the creative power
that unites human beings with one another and with nature, and enables them,
even in a time of destruction, to imagine Jerusalem.

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